How does Argota Marketing qualify leads before delivering them to law firms? Every lead passes four checks before it reaches your intake team: the incident happened in your jurisdiction, it’s within the statute of limitations, the person described something that sounds like a real liability situation, and they’re responsive when contacted. Leads that fail any of those checks don’t get delivered. You also get more than a name and phone number; each lead comes with an incident summary, where they came from, and which screening criteria they passed, so your intake person can open the call already knowing what happened instead of starting from scratch.
Half the leads most firms get from agencies are someone in the wrong state, someone whose accident was three years ago, or someone who filled out a form by mistake and has no idea why a law firm is calling them. The intake person spends 40 hours a week chasing those calls, the firm pays the agency for generating them, and the monthly report counts all of them as “leads delivered” with no distinction between the $200,000 case and the person who pocket-dialed the contact form.
The system I built filters before the lead reaches the firm because I know what it’s like to be the person on the other end of that call, and after enough years of it the only standard that made sense was “would I want to receive this lead myself.” If the answer is no, it doesn’t get passed through, and if that means the lead count on the report is lower than what another agency would show, that’s fine because the number that matters is how many of those leads became signed cases, not how many times the phone rang.
What We Check Before a Lead Gets Sent to You
What does Argota check before delivering a lead? Four things. First, the incident happened somewhere your firm can take the case; right state, right county, right jurisdiction. Second, the timing works; if the statute of limitations is close or already passed, we catch that before you spend time on it. Third, the person described something that points to real liability; not just “I was in an accident” but details like who was at fault or what caused the injury. Fourth, the person is reachable and responsive; they answer a text or pick up a call, which filters out the fake submissions and the people who filled something out at 2am and forgot about it.
The jurisdiction piece alone saves firms more money than most people realize because the default setting on ad platforms like Google shows your ads to anyone “interested in” your city, not just people who are physically there. So a person in New York researching Florida law sees your ad, clicks it, fills out a form, and now your intake person is on the phone with someone you can’t help.
We lock that setting to “people located in” your area and we exclude zip codes and regions that don’t match where you practice, which cuts out a huge chunk of waste before anyone even clicks.
The statute check happens in the form itself. Before we ask for a name or phone number, we ask when the incident happened. If the answer puts them outside the window, the form doesn’t collect their info and doesn’t count as a lead. Same with jurisdiction; if they select a state you don’t cover, they get a polite message and maybe a referral resource, but they never hit your CRM.
The liability piece is harder to automate so it’s more of a screening layer. The form asks what happened, who was at fault, whether there’s a police report, whether they went to the hospital. We’re looking for answers that line up with what your practice area actually needs to move forward; not a legal opinion, just enough detail that your intake person isn’t walking in blind.
The contactability check is the one most agencies skip but it matters more than people think. We reach out within seconds of the form submission, usually by text, and if the person doesn’t respond to that or a follow-up, they don’t get delivered. A form fill from someone who won’t pick up isn’t a lead; it’s a name in a database, and your intake team’s time is worth more than that.
How We Filter Before Anyone Clicks Your Ad
How does Argota prevent unqualified people from clicking in the first place? Through the ad copy itself. Most law firm ads say something broad like “Injured? Call us” which gets clicks from everyone; fender benders, property damage, someone who stubbed their toe, people just curious. We write ads that describe the specific type of case you want; “Hospitalized after a truck accident” or “Rear-ended with documented injuries” or whatever matches your intake criteria. The people who don’t match read the ad and move on without clicking, which saves your ad budget for the people who do match.
I think of the ad copy as a bouncer at the door. A vague ad lets everyone in and your intake team has to sort through the crowd. A specific ad turns away the people who don’t belong before they cost you a click, and the ones who do click are already pre-qualified by the time they land on the page because they read the ad and thought “yeah that’s me.”
This is the piece that moves the numbers more than most firms expect because every click costs real money and in PI it can be $150 to $400 per click in a competitive market. If half your clicks are from people who were never going to have a case you could take, you’re burning half your ad budget before the form even loads, and no amount of intake optimization fixes that.
What You Actually Get When We Send a Lead
What information comes with an Argota lead? More than a name and phone number. Each lead arrives with a summary of the incident including when and where it happened, what the person described, which of the four screening checks they passed, and what search term or ad brought them in. Your intake person can open the call saying “I see you were in an accident on Tuesday and the other driver ran a red light, tell me more” instead of “so what happened” which changes the tone of the conversation from cold screening to warm follow-up.
The source data matters too because over time it shows you which keywords and which types of content produce the leads that actually sign. If “truck accident” leads sign at 15% and “car accident” leads sign at 6%, that tells us where to push the budget, and it tells you which calls to prioritize when they come in.
We push all of this into your CRM directly so there’s no copy-pasting from emails or logging things by hand. The lead shows up in your system ready to be worked, with the context already attached, and your intake process can pick it up from there without any gap between when the person submitted and when someone calls them back.
The Part That Makes It Better Over Time
How does Argota improve lead quality over time? Through a feedback loop. When your firm rejects a lead or signs one, you tell us why. “No insurance.” “Already represented.” “Signed, great case.” That information goes back into the targeting. If a specific zip code keeps producing leads with no insurance coverage, we bid less there. If a certain keyword keeps producing signed cases, we push more budget toward it. The system gets sharper the longer we work together because the targeting learns from your actual outcomes, not just clicks.
This is where most agencies stop; they deliver the lead and move on. We treat the rejection reasons as data because a lead that passed all four checks but still didn’t work tells us something about the targeting that we can fix.
Maybe “slip and fall” leads in a certain part of town are low-value across the board, or maybe leads from one campaign convert at twice the rate of the others. That kind of tracking is how you go from guessing about what’s working to knowing, and it’s how the cost per signed case drops month over month instead of staying flat.
Want to see what intake-ready leads look like for your practice area?
I’ll walk you through the four-check process using your specific criteria, show you what the lead dossier looks like, and set up a test run so you can compare against whatever you’re getting now. If your current source is already delivering this level of quality, great, keep it. If not, you’ll see the difference in the first 30 days.
